Hear the new Scale the Summit album

Scale the Summit’s name says more about the music it makes than any of the pre-approved genres typically applied. Any of the numerous adjectives one might apply to a steep climb — complex, harrowing, thrilling and so on — work better than “metal,” which is where the instrumental band thus far tends to be filed.

From a strictly visual perspective the clean-scrubbed local band doesn’t fit the usual metal trope, which doesn’t mean STS can’t and won’t play alongside rougher bands, like a black metal show in Victoria not too long ago when the band arrived to a particularly evil-obsessed type of music on the PA. “That was a little frightening at first,” says guitarist Chris Letchford. “We didn’t want things thrown at us. But the fans were great, it was our job to win over the crowd.

“Still I don’t really consider our music metal. We don’t have a screamer.”

Instrumental rock is hardly the rare bird it was 20 years ago, still its practitioners have to feel like they’re swimming upstream when most lyric-less music gets filed under jazz and classical. Two albums ago Scale the Summit — Letchford, guitarist Travis Levrier, bassist Jordan Eberhardt and drummer Pat Skeffington — found queries about the absence of a singer irritating, and not without cause. The band’s compositions are delivered such that the two guitars carry the melodic parts that a singer would in another band. The absence of lyrics creates an open-ended relationship with listeners looking for interpretation.

“The music goes through so many moods, we’ll get fans writing us saying a song reminds them of this or that. That’s actually how we come up with the track names. We write the music and listen to it and say, ‘OK, what do you think about it? What do you envision when you listen to it.’ It’s more creative then just telling the listener what it’s about.”

Letchford mentions that he prefers taking in music at IMAX theaters because of the aural experience. “You get these compositional pieces,” he says, “I walk in and it gives me chills, it’s so dark and evil. And then it shifts to something happy and peaceful and builds over 15 minutes into something epic-sounding. Sure people are on their cell phones zoning out, but I much prefer that to Coca Cola commercials.”

Those sorts of shifting tones and textures and moods also appear in Scale the Summit’s music. On Tuesday the band released its third album, The Collective, which features 11 such pieces. The album breaks with a punishing sound on Colossal, but no one mood or theme lingers too long. It’s music of movement, even more so than on the band’s last record Carving Canyons.

“Those songs didn’t shift quite the same way,” he says. “This time I think it’s a crisper loud-to-quiet, loud-to-quiet thing, there are more layers to the sound. There are more dynamics in the compositions.”

The group’s roots are in northwest Houston. Letchford and Levrier grew up 10 blocks from each other and first met at Oak Forest Elementary. Neither knew the other played guitar until high school, at which point they tried to start a band, “Dillinger Escape Plan-type band,” Letchford says, “more chaotic stuff.” But they couldn’t find a permanent drummer in Houston, so they left for Los Angeles to attend the Los Angeles Musicians Institute with the intention of becoming luthiers.

Both learned to build guitars and both never need outside assistance to fix their own instruments. But two months into a six-month program a teacher urged them to give up building guitars.

“They told us that if we wanted to play full-time, don’t build,” Letchford says. “They said your hands start to hurt. It takes up too much time. It’s not that there was no money in building, they just thought it gets in the way of playing.”

The two then enrolled in a 18-month guitar performance school at the institute, where they met Skeffington and Eberhardt, who they had to convince to first, play in an instrumental band, and second, leave Los Angeles for Houston.

“They were so against it,” Letchford says. “But I drew them a timeline: ‘Here’s what we do, we’re going to move back to Texas, record a full-length album, shop it around to labels, and then tour.’

“What they didn’t know is I’m one of the most hard-working, diligent people around. I put my mind to a goal and then I don’t give up.”

The band released Monument independently in 2007.

Letchford dreamed that after five or six years the band might open for Dream Theater, the legendary progressive metal band beloved by Letchford’s father. When the opener on a Dream Theater tour fell out, the still wet Scale the Summit, which had by then signed to the Los Angeles metal label Prosthetic, was picked to take that spot.

“It felt a little like we stepped into the big leagues instantly, and the label seemed concerned,” he says. “We looked so young. They’d have a rep come out to our show to make sure everything went OK. The hired a tour manager, which we didn’t need. None of us as a drinking problem. Only big touring bands or bands that need a parent figure to keep from getting messed up need that.
“It’s tough to make a career in instrumental music like this, but we’re committed to this.”